School board approves new teacher evaluation system

Published
12:00 am CDT, Wednesday, July 16, 2014

ALTON — Alton School District administrators will soon change the way the evaluate teachers — and themselves.

The Alton School Board approved a new teacher evaluation system Tuesday that will go into effect for the 2015-16 school year. The board also approved new principal performance evaluations, which will be used in the upcoming school year.

The new system for evaluating teachers will be Danielson Group’s Framework for Teaching evaluation system, a system adopted by the state of Illinois as its standard evaluation system as well.

The new system will require administrators to evaluate teachers based on 22 components for instruction grouped into four domains — planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction and professional responsibilities. Human Resources Director Mark Cappel characterized the environment and instruction domains as the “on-stage” evaluations, or evaluations on how a teacher performs in the classroom with students, and described the planning and professional responsibilities domains as “off-stage” evaluations.

Administrators will utilize a four-rating system for evaluating the teachers, with teachers being deemed excellent, proficient, needs improvement or unsatisfactory in each component. All components are combined to give each domain an overall rating with one of the four classifications, and teachers receive an overarching rating based on the ratings of each of the four domains.

Board member Vivian Monckton expressed concern that the evaluation process seemed “cumbersome” to the administrators doing the evaluations. Cappel said that while the process will require more of teachers, the “much more objective” evaluation system than the one currently used by the district will also yield better results.

“There’s no doubt there is going to be more work created through this process for administrators and teachers,” Cappel said, “but it’s going to be more effective.”

Board member David Lauschke said his concern with evaluation systems, both the district’s former system and the new one being implemented, is a tendency for systems to be too easy on the grading scale.

“When I see ‘excellent’ across the board, it’s worthless,” Lauschke said. “I think that we’ve been way too loose with ‘excellent’.”

Cappel said the new system will help to better classify teachers’ performance as well as help administrators make important decisions regarding those teachers going forward.

“Our ‘excellent’ in our dinosaur rating system that we’ve been using is Danielson’s ‘proficient,’” Cappel said. “I believe it is a tool that will better equip administrators for making those tougher decisions.”

Other notes from the July 15 meeting:

The board approved the amended budget for the 2013-14 school year.

The budget was amended to include adjusted expenditures in the education fund and some unexpected revenue from the state of Illinois, which made its last payment of the fiscal year on June 30. Superintendent Kenneth Spells said it was the first time the state has made all its categorical payments in the correct fiscal year in recent memory.

Despite being paid on time, the district still lost out on approximately $2 million due to prorated general state aid and transportation payments. The state prorated general aid at 89 percent and transportation at 74 percent during the 2013 fiscal year.

“The three-year total in lost revenues due to prorating payments is approximately $5.5 million,” Spells said.

The school board also approved a contract extension with Aramark for food service for the 2014-15 school year.

Nathan Grimm may be reached at 618-208-6451 or on Twitter @GrimmTelegraph.